Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Horace Magoun

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. HORACE MAGOUN
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
August 20, 1984
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. MAGOUN: …delighted to do this and you mentioned I should go way back to where it started and so on.
MR. LARSON: That’s right.
DR. MAGOUN: So I can say just briefly something about my family background.
MR. LARSON: Good, I think that’s very valuable to get a picture.
DR. MAGOUN: This may not be a masterpiece, but it’s an approach. The name Magoun, McGowan, McGovern are all derivatives form the Gallic “Mac” which means “son of” and “Goun” which means “blacksmith”. So that presumably the families with those names have all descended from original Scottish blacksmiths who must by now be long gone. Considering the number of progeny involved in his life and all the way down must have been quite accurate in developing more members of the clan. When I mentioned that these names are all derivatives from a single source I have a sheet here that indicates how easily it is to confuse one with another because in the UCLA southern campus medical students annual publication in 1956, there were a small number of the faculty who had their photograph and a little squib of achievements.
MR. LARSON: Fine. If you wouldn’t mind Dr. Magoun, since this is in automatic focus, if you would just hold it up a little closer to the lens and you can get… Yes, that’s fine.
DR. MAGOUN: Well it was very pleasantly written account of me and this fellow and his picture, but the picture that is under my name is Professor Kenneth McGowan of the Theater Arts Department on this campus. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or insulted, but I’m just using it now as a backup for evidence that these names do get in the way there. But the first of the Magouns in America were workers in wood rather than in metal as I presume a blacksmith would. When they established a Magoun Boat yards in Medford, Massachusetts, from which in the early 19th century the wooden sailing ships were slipped down a ways into the Charles River and out into Boston Harbor to serve the country’s early commerce. And following that the nation’s U.S. Navy and preserving this association with the sea, my grandmother Magoun operated a soup kitchen for derelicts near the docks in Philadelphia. My father’s brother, Earl Magoun who died only recently, was at that time the oldest surviving naval veteran of the Spanish American War. My father, Roy Winchell Magoun, an episcopal clergyman established and directed a Seaman’s Church Institute at Newport, Rhode Island, during the First World War when Newport was one of the largest naval training centers in the country. On the distaff side of the family, my grandmother Lucy was one of three daughters of a Cole, C-O-L-E family from England who had settled in West Newton, a Boston suburb. As a boy I spent a number of summers with those two sisters, then in retirement at the old family home, after careers of teaching in the Boston school system. Lucy, one of the three, and my grandmother led a more eventful life. She married Horace Mason Perkins who after graduating from Boston Medical and Dental School sailed with his bride to Japan in 1874 to set up a practice of dentistry in Yokohama and that was the only seaport open to foreign commerce in Japan at the time.
MR. LARSON: Yes that must have been very short time after Japan was opened up to the other parts of the world.
DR. MAGOUN: It was indeed. He was, my grandfather was reported to be especially skilled in installing gold fillings and was noted for his speediness in such operations. During his long stay there a series of young Japanese apprentices studied dental work of this nature under his tutelage and received certificates of completion which they then sent off to practices themselves, perhaps having their own protégés in Japan.
MR. LARSON: That must have been the first dental school in Japan.
DR. MAGOUN: I’m not certain that it was of course, but it couldn’t have been much more before that. Following the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Japan, Yokohama was declared an open port and the “Hill” to the seaward community, was designated as a foreign colony. My grandfather’s clinic was in a building along the beach. They hadn’t built up anything more than a sort of arrangement like that but his small home was on this hill across from a little English church that was one of the earliest churches built there. My mother and my uncle were born and spent their childhood in this setting. A few years ago on a visit to the site of my grandfather’s house, the cherry trees on the side of the hill coming down from the church and graveyard, which had nothing, no Japanese names on the tombstones. The cherry blossoms were all out in full flower and I could easily imagine my mother as a little girl playing there beneath the blossoms. In the 1880’s, my grandfather moved to and continued his practice in Shang Hai, China, and my mother was educated at the French commune there. They hadn’t at that time developed any foreign educational arrangements in Japan itself and the family subsequently returned to Boston, and my mother, after becoming involved in activities in the Episcopal Church, met and married my father. Still later while I was a boy in Newport, Rhode Island, because my father had one parish after another for a long period of time, but finally settled at Newport. My mother use to take me shopping with her and often stopped to buy cheese which my father was very fond of, at a fancy French grocery store established then in Newport for the wealthy summer colony trade. Newport was at its highest peak in the summer colony and still on-going at that time. The proprietor, Emil, was always in the back room working on the books, while Madame was often out in the store waiting on the customers. She and my mother always conversed in elegant French and I can still hear like a tinkling bar of music, Madame calling to the back of the store, “Emil, Emil, quel le la mere du fromage.” (Laughter) Well at Newport, I attended the grade school where the principal wore noisy high buttoned boots and was named Squeaker Carr because you could hear him coming into the room or down the hall, while his female assistant moved silently about in sweeping skirts and they were sweeping.
MR. LARSON: Was this a private school or a public school?
DR. MAGOUN: This was a public school. Oh yes. She was known as Tiptoe Sal. On graduation I was awarded the school’s Rumford Medal, the last I ever received at school and then went on to high school. I don’t know that I’ll, oh, one of the major things that perhaps is pertinent for the present is that by that time I had learned to drive an automobile and they were just coming into that area of Vermont at that time.
MR. LARSON: What time, what year was that?
DR. MAGOUN: This was in, oh, I’ll have to get my calculator out. I’ll tell it to you later.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: I’ll look into it, but I could drive an automobile and the school’s history teacher, a Ms. Higby, employed me as, bought a Buick as I recall, and then employed me as a part-time chauffeur. From this early association I developed a career long interest in history, which now in retirement, I currently pursue full time. Newport was the most attractive setting in the 1920’s. This would have been to toward the later of the ‘20’s I think, particularly in the summer. There were three beaches around the end of the island and the one in the middle was undeveloped. We use to enjoy the low dunes and the salt green beach grass and the crescent of sloping sand and the white tinged surf rolling in, with swooping gulls and [inaudible] always in the background. A wealthy summer colony maintained a casino with a favorable summer stock… do you want to stop making the noise please?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: …Bellview Avenue, the Lipton Cup Yacht races were operational there at that time, as well as the International Cup tennis matches and my brother liked to hang around the tennis courts as I did the theater. These youthful pleasures never last and in the fall of ’25, 1925, my brother and I went off to Rhode Island State College. Just outside the village of Kingston was still a surviving colonial inn, was an early coach stop on the old post road between Boston and New York. I lived in a small room in the back of this inn and gained my meals as a waiter and dish washer at a small restaurant operated just off campus. My brother majored in education and I in biology, out of as best I can remember a romantic interest and attachment for nature. The biology professor, at Little Rhody as it was called at that time, was known to the students as Buggy Barlow, both for literal reasons because of his interest in entomology which dovetailed with the research activities in the agricultural experiment station, a characteristic of even the smallest of the land grant colleges. It was specified that this began to develop activities in agriculture. Are you through with whatever it is you keep rustling?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: Very good. At the, I mentioned Buggy Barlow our biology teacher there and in a rather, plugging along in a rather [inaudible] program I did take the, at the end of my junior year, a summer course in marine biology at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. Our mentor, let’s see, our mentor at this program a biologist from Harvard whose name I won’t mention seemed too keen and completely lacking in the charisma of the predecessor Louie Agathy and was very little improvement over Barlow. But I should be very careful of not denigrating Buggy because… Now would you take the… You want to stop this a minute?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: In any case, in my senior year in college Professor Barlow received notice of a half time teaching assistantship for graduate study to the master’s degree in zoology at Syracuse University, New York. The Depression was settling in during 1929 and without such support for advanced studies I would, wouldn’t be able to go on with my education. I promptly applied and was most grateful to be accepted. The zoology program at Syracuse was much more lively than that at Kingston. In New York State during that period, the popular sport fishing in the lakes, ponds, and streams became threatened by the deprivation of the game fish population by two aquatic competitors. One was the voracious bottom feeding carp which consumed all of the freshwater vegetation on which the small animal life subsisted to provide in turn the food supply of the game fish. The other the primitive eel shaped protromidon [sp?] was a true predator that attached its round sucker like mouth to the side of game fish and fatally sucked out their vital fluids. Professor William Martin Smallwood supplemented his university appointment by consulting to the state fishery commission which in addition supported his departmental research. Its long time goal was to eradicate the carp and the protromidon from New York’s fishing waters. In Dr. Smallwood’s view the embryonic stages of these predators provided the most vulnerable period for their attack and limitation. Each graduate student was assigned a research project on some feature of their embryogenesis. I have never enjoyed the minute details of microscopic study, but in reading I had noticed that the protromidon had two gigantic nerve cells, one on each side of its lower brain, at the entrance of the vestibular, or the balancing nerve. The short drendenic or receiving branches that reached giant neurons grew out into the entering vestibular fibers and was excited by their signal. The long [inaudible] transmitting branch grew all the way down the spinal cord giving off the laterals along the way which excited the spinal motor valve flow the length of the body musculature. With these two giant neurons, the fish automatically preserved its optimal right side up position in the constantly moving water in response to signals from its balancing receptor. The embryogenesis of these large nerve cells in the protromidon formed the subject of my master’s thesis and adventitiously initiated my first career involvement in neuroscience.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point there. Your future interests in neuroscience and brains and everything…
DR. MAGOUN: At the start were fishy.
MR. LARSON: Yes well but started right at your early graduate work then.
DR. MAGOUN: Just at my master’s degree.
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting. The only one that I have known that has started that early before was Madame Curie who started with her, you might say her masters work in the field of radioactivity and never left it.
DR. MAGOUN: Isn’t that fascinating? Let me see now. At Syracuse the laboratory program in freshman biology was designed by Professor Smallwood around studies, the study of the pickled earthworm. In the initial exercise in the course, explored the range of normal variations in biology, and its application to each student receiving a contorted shriveled earthworm reeking of phormaline laid out in a pan. In crouching over it to use a hand lens the student counted the number of segments from the mouth to the tail. The TA’s, the teaching assistants recorded the range and frequency of these numbers and constructed a Gaussian curve on the blackboard from the data of the entire class. This seemed a repellent way to introduce beginning students to biology to me and I was all to improve it the next fall. Back in Newport in the intervening summer I visited the docks were the local scallop fishing boats came in and the scallops were shucked and the shells thrown up in great piles along the shore. I arranged for an old [inaudible] who hung around the docks to fill several barrels with these shells and ship them to me at Syracuse. Back at the biology laboratory we filled a large wash boiler with water and lye and dumped in the shells and set them to boiling with Bunsen burners where there were a bunch of burners for the chemistry things…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: …in the same laboratory. On washing them off afterwards with a hose, the shells came out gleamingly pearly white and pink with the prominent ridges of scallops on their backs clearly visible to the naked eye at 20 feet. This time at the first session on each students desk was a pile of these lovely shells. Everyone as large as the palm of your hand and still smelling faintly of the sea. After counting the ridges on the back of the shell they were piled up by numbers of ridges and the profile of these piles itself formed a graphic Gaussian curve.
MR. LARSON: Very good. So you had a very good introduction into biometry and statistics at that point.
DR. MAGOUN: Certainly and I can attest that the students enjoyed it more than those damn worms.
MR. LARSON: Much more vital presentation.
DR. MAGOUN: I agree. The next time I was back at Newport I told the old [inaudible] who shipped us the shells of our success and he said, “You don’t know the half of it. The fisherman saw me packaging these shells and wanted to know what was going on. I told them that all the big universities had begun to use shells in their programs now and if they wanted to make some money they should write to the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Columbia University and ask each one of them how many barrels of scallop shells they wanted shipped.” (Laughter) I wonder what those presidents thought when they got that message. During my first year at Syracuse a young assistant professor of zoology named Walter R. Ingram with a simple name of Rex Ingram following the movie star of that era, was a great favorite in the department, but left at the end of that year to go to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. The following spring I was delighted to have a letter from him saying that an institute of neurology had been established at Northwestern and its director Dr. Stephen W. Ranson had a small number of scholarships for doctoral graduate study and research. Again I applied promptly and the second opportunity for support during the Depression had unexpectedly appeared, this time at Ranson’s Institute of Neurology in Chicago where my subsequent career in neuroscience really began. This institute had been established in 1928 and during its initial year he had revived the use of the [inaudible] clock instrument which was a rectangular metal frame that fitted onto an animal’s head and permitted the positioning of electrodes in the interior of the brain either to stimulate or destroy a focal area, or to record the amplified electrical record of its activity. If you want to stop this for just a second…
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: …this instrument had been constructed from photographs in [Robert] Clarke’s original paper in 1908 and during his first year at the institute Ingram had prepared his stereotaxic atlas of the cat’s brain from which coordinates could be derived for inserted electrodes wherever needed. For more than a decade before Ranson had studied vasomotor responses stimulating the exposed floor of the fourth ventricle and postural responses of the body and limbs to stimulating the transected brain stem of the cerebrum animal. Now he was able to with this implement reach any desired structure inside the brain without removing overlying parts of the nervous system simply by exerting electrodes through small openings in the cranium. After the development of their instrument just after the turn of the century, [Victor] Horsley and Clarke had done almost nothing with it, but at Ranson’s institute until his death in 1942, his instrument was kept humming in a range of projects on the role of the hypothalamus and lower brain stem in this role integration and the emotional expression and in the regulation of feeding, fighting, mating and other vital behavioral functions. It contributed to the well-being of the internal environment as well as the preservation of the individual and the race. As a research fellow I was promptly assigned to operate this remarkable apparatus on which the entire program of the institute rested. Without previous manipulative work with experimental animals my first experience was almost catastrophic. The instrument was fastened to the animals head by bars that inserted in each external auditory canal and little plugs were slipped in first to hold the bar up and in position and in the awkwardness and attention of my maiden effort one of the plugs slipped out of the cat’s ear and all efforts to locate it were futile. I went down on the laboratory floor on my hands and knees, but there was no trace of the plug. Finally I went despairingly home where on disrobing for bed the plug dropped out of the cuff of my trouser leg. I no longer wore cuffs after that.
MR. LARSON: That’s a good recommendation for not having cuffs.
DR. MAGOUN: Following this poor beginning I did acquire dexterity with the instrument with which the entire interior of the brain became an accessible [ inaudible] for experimentations in a way that had never been possible before. After Rex Ingram had left Ranson’s institute to become professor and chairman of anatomy at the University of Iowa where he was able to run his own show, I was assigned his role in inducting the growing number of graduate fellows, post-doctorals, and visiting scientists at the institute into the use of the Horsley-Clarke instrument and other laboratory facilities. Although it has been said that Ranson never actually used this instrument his pride in it continued high and whenever a new visitor arrived Ranson promptly brought him into the laboratory and would always say, “Now this is the Horsley-Clarke Instrument and this is Dr. Magoun.” (Laughter) This is perhaps an apocryphal story, but the same thing was earlier true of Horsley and Clarke, Clarke having been the, one of the partners who really prepared the instrument. He, Clarke, was a little known physiologist, but he would design, developed, and utilize the instrument, but all the credit and recognition went to the dashing young neurosurgeon, Horsley. It was Horsley who had all the distinguished visitors come to see it and he promptly took them into the laboratory and always said, “Now this is the Horsley-Clarke instrument and this is Dr. Clarke.” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Very interesting.
DR. MAGOUN: At the turn of the century, research base in medical was hard to come by. Horsley’s laboratory at University College, London, was little more than a storage space under a sloping amphitheater. So it was only possible to stand up right at one end of the room. Ranson had first seen the Horsley-Clarke instrument in a visit to London in 1910 in that laboratory. Ranson had also seen a precise replica of the original Horsley-Clarke instrument made by the same craftsman in London for the late Dr. Ernest Sach a visiting person in England who had trained in neurosurgery and he had later become professor of neurosurgery at Washington University, St. Louis where Ranson spent a period as professor of anatomy. On Sach’s retirement, I should say first that on returning to this country Sachs arranged with Clarke to have a second, a replica, a second Horsley-Clarke instrument which he purchased and brought back to St. Louis. While Ranson was at the same medical school he had seen its use by Sachs in the neurosurgical laboratory. On Sach’s retirement from active neurosurgery, he moved to Yale University Medical School where, in 1956 in a moving ceremony he presented his Horsley-Clark instrument to me. And it now rests and stays in the nation’s archives of the history of neuroscience at UCLA with the earplugs all in place. (Laughter) This is the second Horsley-Clarke instrument that was ever prepared in the world.
MR. LARSON: That is a fascinating story. So we have here a very historic piece there which really opened up the science of studying the brain and nerve function.
DR. MAGOUN: Exactly stated, yes. We always bring it out and present it to visitors here, but I never say, “Now, this is the Horsley-Clarke instrument and this is Dr. Larson.” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. This is very fascinating, a very fascinating instrument and a very historic instrument here.
DR. MAGOUN: Every once in a while we put in something with some lye in it and get it shiny again, but I don’t want to get the thing destroyed in any fashion. Well, following Ranson’s death in 1942, I was invited to move from this well-appointed institute in the Central Tower of Northwestern Medical School down to among the bare bones of the anatomy department. There I abruptly became aware of the expensive nature of the research that had been going on. All of the support from which had been obtained by Ranson. Research grants for young scientists were unheard of in the 1940’s, but the annual epidemic of polio in that era led to the formation of a new National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the fundraising program of which was called the March of Dimes. Do you remember the March of Dimes?
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I can remember…
DR. MAGOUN: It was one of those early approaches to get collecting public funds.
MR. LARSON: I think it was probably one of the first for collecting funds for research, actually aimed at a specific…
DR. MAGOUN: At a focal disorder.
MR. LARSON: Yes and a very successful fundraising effort and a very successful from the standpoint for what those funds brought forth.
DR. MAGOUN: I want to tell you one thing. A number of Chicago cases, and it was sort of endemic in Chicago for a number of years, was [inaudible] Chicago cases of that period were of the borbet type, rather than in the spinal cord which was more common. They were up in the bottom of the brain, in the brain stem.
MR. LARSON: What are the different manifestations of the two different types?
DR. MAGOUN: The ones that were in the brain stem if they became much enlarged would paralyze the respiratory system.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: The respiratory system, or the vasomotor system. Most of these were fatal cases. In spinal cases, they paralyze our limbs, but they don’t interfere with the vital activities that are operated in the stem of the brain, inside the cranium.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well that clarifies a very important point there.
DR. MAGOUN: There is a major difference. In any case a number of these were borbet type and with trepidation I had applied to the Foundation for some of their dimes to study the neuropathology of fatal cases as we had just been discussing, and then explore the functions of the injured region in animal experiments. To my astonishment the project was supported. In the fatal cases, the central reticular core of the brain stem proved to be the principal seed of injury and in related animal studies stimulation of this region did not itself evoke motor responses, but either facilitated or inhibited ongoing motor performance depending on the site of stimulation. These studies in the human brain suggested that the particular formation of the brain stem contributed importantly to the extra neural motor function of the brain and in this work I participated in some of the activities of a second research center that by then had been established in Chicago, the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. Its research director, Dr. Percival Bailey had recruited Warren McCuller, Gerhard von Berneen and a number of research oriented young surgeons to the INI, the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute was always known in the basement laboratory there for research. Among others of these was a talented young neurosurgeon, John Douglas French, who was returning to his native California to become chief of neurosurgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Long Beach, near Los Angeles, of whom more later. Another important association in this period is that of Donald B. Lensly who moved to Northwestern’s Evanston campus as professor of psychology coming from Brown University. In his earlier years, Don had become an expert at electroencephalography at Harvard, EEG for short. At Brown he had provided important insights in the development of the EEG in children and at Northwestern he was interested in getting into electrophysiology and animal experimentation. The facilities were lacking on the Evanston Campus so he set up an EEG research facility in the anatomy department of the medical school. Serendipitously, Giuseppe Maritsi from Pisa, Italy, who had earlier gained electrophysiological experience with Hadrien in London and Vermeer, came to Chicago for a year as a Rockefeller fellow to our laboratory. During some initial experiments on the interrelations of the brain stem with cerebellar inhibition, we were perplexed to note the large slow waves of the particle EEG of lightly anesthetized animals recorded that relatively low amplitude because of their high reach became abolished during stimulation of the brain stem particular formation. This was readily repeatable but we thought that some artifact must be involved. After ruling out a variety of possible complications, the amplification of the cortical record was by chance turned up. Then we saw that when the large slow waves gave way during particular stimulation there was instead a record of low voltage fast activity called, the term at that time, EEG arousal, a pattern which was characteristic of alert attention in the human EEG. Invocation of this generalized EEG response has since become common place, but it is still possible to recall the arousal evoked in the investigators by its initial display in response to stimulation, a focal part of the brain, the brain stem reticular formation. In related animal studies with Dr. Lensly it was found that the EEG arousal evoked, could be evoked also by peripheral sensory stimulation and was conducted through this central reticular core of the brain rather than along the conspicuously lateral pathways through the brain stem. In early studies of wakefulness, evoked by [inaudible] stimulation in the cat it has been found that this low voltage fast pattern of EEG activity could be initiated equivalently by a range of sensory modalities and however elicited was distributed generally over the cortex without [inaudible] or the specific sensory involved. Furthermore once initiated this EEG pattern tended to persist for periods far longer than the brief sensory stimuli that sent it into play. While indicating the importance of [inaudible] stimulation and evoking EEG and [inaudible] these observations had suggested the additional role of a central mechanism with a more general influence and a greater intrinsic capacity for maintained excitation than any specific [inaudible]. These Chicago studies with Maritsi and Lensly identified this widespread cortisiprical projection with the central brain stem reticular formation which serves wakefulness and the focus of attention and through which the arousing influences of adherent stimulation are effected. This pattern of low voltage, fast discharge in the EEG had been known since its initial observation by Hans Berger in Germany in the 1920’s was now recognized as a function of the ascending ventricular system. In addition to its association with alert wakefulness it appears to form a background for the perception of sensation as well as for higher intellectual activity in voluntary movement and behavior. Anything that can be learned about the intimate physiology of these processes may be expected therefore to make some contribution to an understanding of the relations to the brain and perhaps the mind. The impact of these findings on the ascending ventricular system responsible for cortical wakefulness and the focus of attention was a ranger one. There are a number of succeeding commentaries that buy this. The most amusing and appealing to me being a short verse composed by a young medical student, Paul Pearlstein at the University of Illinois. Its title was “The Formation Reticular for Impulses Vehicular of Dr. Magoun, No Medical Loon” and the verse continued:
“The reticular formation has an awkward location in the most hidden spot that the cat has got. I’ve never seen it, but to be quite fair I believe the men who say it’s there because if it wasn’t, it would mean the ruin of the reputation of Doc Magoun, who claims that this web like formation is a great back feeding nuclear station. It helps my mind awake and sleep. It helps the Lord my soul to keep. The gland pineal can justly damned, for it’s too small a place for this soul to be crammed. The ventricles are just a hole, to ephemeral a substance for the soul. So since I’m made of sterner stuff, I’m sure unless Magoun’s a bluff that my inner person, king or bum resides in my reticulum.”
MR. LARSON: Very good. He’s a real talent for literature there and brought in the scientific facts in a very understandable way.
DR. MAGOUN: He shouldn’t have gone on to medical school. He had more talent I think. This next period will start in the beginnings of the brain research institute here in which we are presently sitting.
MR. LARSON: Yes, now let’s see. We should probably fix the time frame of this. What year was that that we start?
DR. MAGOUN: For me it was 1950.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: I arrived with the family here in Westwood, Santa Monica actually, in, the Fourth of July, 1950.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: We didn’t have any firecrackers, but we were parading a feeling just by getting settled in California. From about mid-century on the research in the biomedical and the other sciences in this country like pans on a hot stove, began to steam and bubble. During World War II the Office of Scientific Research and Development had poured millions of dollars in war-related research and a subsequent report of its director Vannevar Bush entitled, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” which I’m sure is familiar to you.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Advocated the post-war continuation of federal support of research and training in the sciences, and this was followed up by the Presidents and Congress. To advance the biomedical science the already existing National Institute of Health was greatly expanded. In addition, the independent Science Foundation was established to support basic research in all scientific fields. Grants for research and training grants to prepare more research scientists were initiated together with construction grants, grants for the establishment of research institutes in priority fields and other ramifying developments all of which took off like the subsequent A-bombs of AEC and the moon rockets of NASA. By contrast at Northwestern Medical School, Ranson’s former Institute of Neurology had become essentially dismantled by mid-century and prospects for expanding investigative activities there were somewhere below zero. With a real investigative breakthrough in progress taking off from the background of the achievements of Ranson’s institute I felt quite boxed in in Chicago. In the pattern of many earlier serendipitous features in my career, in the spring of 1950 I was invited to join the just developing new medical school at UCLA to establish its department of anatomy. Needless to say I accepted promptly. We bought an old, but operational Lincoln sedan and drove out to the western National Parks with three children to arrive in Los Angeles and start a new life in California as I said on the Fourth of July, 1950. The department of anatomy developed expeditiously but from the background of my previous experience I recognized the difficulties in establishing a novel research program in a new medical school. The founding dean, Stafford L. Warren, was however an alumnus of the University of California Medical School at Berkeley and San Francisco. As a medical student he had been a research assistant of Herbert M. Evans, the distinguished endocrinologist at Berkeley and later was staff, was a Hooper Foundation Fellow with George Whipple, subsequently a Nobel Laureate for his research on the liver at San Francisco. Dean Warren encouraged these early research traditions at the new medical school at UCLA and in this he was aided and abetted by Dr. John D. French, the chief of neurosurgery at the Long Beach VA Hospital, in my earlier Chicago acquaintance at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. Shortly after moving to UCLA in 1950 I joined with French in developing a collaborative program in the interdisciplinary research in the neurosciences at the Long Beach VA Hospital. During the following decade, other faculty at the growing medical school, post-doctorals from many institutions and visiting scientists from this country and abroad, extended the dimensions of our initial program to that of an exceedingly active brain research institute in [inaudible] with John D. French, its founding director. In 1961, this aggregate brain research institute program moved from Long Beach to a newly constructed 10 story wing of research laboratories and related facilities on the UCLA campus interconnecting the medical school proper with the neuropsychiatric institute which had already been established here in something of a pattern of its forbearer at the University of California, San Francisco. The dimensions of growth and the range of investigative activities in the BRI [Brain Research Institute] during its first quarter century are indicated by the fields of some 175 research projects underway in the institute in 1976-77. The largest of these were in neurobiology and in declining order those in other fields were neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuroendocrinology, behavioral sciences, pharmacology, neuro-engineering and computer sciences and neuro-anatomy. Some additional projects were ongoing in the BRI clinical neurophysiology program interrelating basic sciences with neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuro-pathologists, and psychologist. Related closely to these research programs have been the institutes of educational activities. Although a research institute may not enroll students for itself, or for curricular enroll students, or award degrees, but graduate students in traditional departmental programs may serve as research assistants or pursue dissertation projects in the BRI’s laboratory. During ’76-’77 there were 184 graduate students in the BRI. The numbers in the six leading departmental fields being psychology, anatomy, in declining order, physiology, biology, biological chemistry, and pharmacology. The largest group of all however comprised 46 students enrolled in a novel interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in neuroscience initiated in 1968 with John French chairman of its administrating committee representing nine cooperating departments. During ’73 to ’77, 16 Ph.D.’s had already been awarded in this new graduate field.
MR. LARSON: What would be some of the typical Ph.D. theses in this? What would be some examples perhaps?
DR. MAGOUN: I wish I had, we have files that have every one of them, but I can’t quickly retrieve a precise title, but it was very much as was the post-doctoral research going on for more advanced levels of research and training. There were a substantial number, 142 post-doctoral fellows and 68 visiting scientists collaborating in the investigative program ongoing in the BRI during this period. Over the past decade, approximately one third of these advanced investigators had come from some 40 countries in both the graduate and doctoral dissertations and in the post-doctoral training which was even larger than the graduate, the novel and usual pattern was they would join the ongoing programs of the professors or the other mentors.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: So that they didn’t have to generate novel programs of their own unless they wished to, in which case they were given whatever assistance we could find, but it melted into ongoing programs, but they could then take sections of them for themselves and go on that way. We never pushed anyone down, but we helped them get up by giving them a period of just adapting to what you do when you’re doing research in the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: It sounds like it would be a very productive technique for bringing both the students and the field along.
DR. MAGOUN: Right. Also it was productive in the sense that a number of these students identified features that hadn’t been looked at and pushed into those and embellished the program by this influx of new outlooks and persons…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: …through the time. In 1976, after 25 years of leadership, both in the development and continuing administration at the BRI, Dr. French announced his retirement as director. Regrets were tempered by his simultaneous announcement of an endowed Leslie chair in neuroscience at UCLA, together with an additional reward of $1 million by the Ahmanson Foundation to establish and equip a new Ahmanson laboratory of neurobiology at the Brain Research Institute. Dr. French’s talented successor as director of the BRI is Carmine D. Clemente, professor and former chairman of the anatomy department at UCLA who was attracted to this campus in 1952. Earlier at the University of Pennsylvania, Clemente had been a protégé of William F. Wendell, who had previously succeeded Ranson as the director of the Institute of Neurology at Northwestern University. Ranson in turn had been the last doctoral graduate and protégé of Henry H. Donaldson who had left the University of Chicago in 1905 to direct a neuroscience research program at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. A year later the Wistar Institute was formally recognized by a then existing international brain research commission as the central institute for brain research in America. From its beginnings at the start of the century therefore, this genetic strain of directors of neuroscience research units Donaldson, Ranson, Wendell, French, and Clemente, was now in its fifth generation.
MR. LARSON: Amazing.
DR. MAGOUN: I don’t, I think you could turn that off if you wanted.
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: Following these developments in the decade preceding my retirement, I became increasingly involved in administrative activities related to higher education and research as dean of the graduate division at UCLA. In this period, I served also on three NIH councils, mental health, neuro and [inaudible] research as well as on the advisory committees of the LNM, NASS [National Agricultural Statistics Service], NSF [National Science Foundation] and the National Research Council for which I later directed the fellowship of it for a couple of years, ’72 to ’74. In the area of international activities of science, I was on the joint committee of the US-Japan cooperative science program involving the Departments of State and National Science Foundation, as well as the Medical Research Committee of the Pan-American Health Organization in Latin America. I was also on the executive committee of the International Brain Research Organization, abbreviated IBRO, established at UNESCO House, Paris in 1960. The history of which is of great interest. During the 1950’s and ‘60’s with the accelerating growth of the neurosciences a number of small conference programs developed in this field, both to advance communication between investigators and to catalyze there collaboration in interdisciplinary directions. Four of these early conference programs, each in a different country were first the Macy Foundation Conferences in this country, second, the Ciba Foundation Symposia in the United Kingdom, third, the Ghagra Symposia on the Black Sea in Georgia, USSR, and a series of Colluque de Marseilles [trans: Conference in France] in France. In this later series, the fifth colluque in 1955 was marked by the initial participation abroad of scientists from the USSR, two of whom from Moscow attended. A year later, [French Name], the colluque’s director was invited to Moscow for a meeting with these Soviet scientists at their Academy of Sciences as an outcome of which the Academy sponsored an international colloquium on the EEG of higher nervous activity in Moscow in 1958. This Moscow colloquium was the first such gathering in this field to be held in the USSR since the congress of the international union of physiological sciences which had convened in Moscow in 1935 under the presidency of I.P. [Ivan Petrovich] Pavlov.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it goes back to the grand old name of, you might say, brain research.
DR. MAGOUN: Yes. At the colloquium’s concluding session, it was a week long program, in 1958, the participants stirred by the report that had developed, unanimously resolved to form a prominent international organization for the study of the brain, to facilitate contacts between scientists in different countries and in varied disciplines of this field. Shortly after delegates from the colloquium, presented this resolution to UNESCO and two years later the International Brain Research Organization as I abbreviated before, IBRO, was formally established with a program that proposed a series of interdisciplinary symposia, a survey of scientists in each country, research laboratories and programs in all countries and a number of other activities. The elated US survey for IBRO was undertaken in 1968-’69 after the supervision of a brain research committee, or under the supervision of the Brain Sciences Committee of the National Research Council. It identified the astonishingly enlarged number of more than 4,500 neuroscientists in this country.
MR. LARSON: I had no idea that…
DR. MAGOUN: Nobody did.
MR. LARSON: …there was that many. It’s such an extensive…
DR. MAGOUN: Nobody did. The Brain Sciences Committee was so impressed that in 1969 under its auspices a Society for Neuroscience was organized in this country, the first annual meeting of which was held in Washington in 1971. Its current membership in 1981 exceeds 7,000 and the total number of scientists in all fields of neuroscience in this country is currently estimated at about 10,000 with the prospect of increasing 15,000 by 1985. I don’t know if that is going to be met or not. This projection is from a report on manpower in basic neurological and communicative sciences. Present status and future needs, published as a NINCDIS monograph in 1977. It was prepared by a National Research Council committee of neuroscientists for which I was a consultant and co-ghost writer during 1975-’76, my last professional responsibility in this field. To return to the founding of IBRO at the first meeting of its executive committee in 1961, support was given to the proposal that IBRO engage in active work in the field of brain history, considered from an original and multi-disciplinary point of view. I was appointed chairman of the subcommittee on brain history, this subcommittee on brain history which when informed was to arrange meetings in associations with congress and symposia, collect and display historical material, consider the translation and republication of certain classical works now out of print, with contemporary commentaries attached, also to establish a program center for these activities probably in the division of medical history at the University of California, at Los Angeles. All of this is being quoted from the IBRO bulletin, volume 1, 1962. Until his death in 1970, C. Donald O’Malley, then professor of medical history at UCLA played an active role in organizing a number of historical conferences and symposia in different countries and in collaboration with Dr. Edwin Clark, published an exceedingly value of compilations of translations of the history of the human brain and spinal cord. In this same stream and I am presently engaged in the study of the development of the neuro behavioral and communicative sciences in this country with particular emphasis on those conjunctional steps leading to the present interdisciplinary field of neuroscience. My preoccupation with brain history has long been an avocational interest for which only limited opportunities were previously available. Now in so-called retirement I am happily able to pursue this fascinating subject full time and I would just like to add as a conclusion…
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …that the most recent publication that we have been able to print has been the, and I quote the title, “An American contribution to neuroscience: the Brain Research Institute UCLA, 1959 to 1984.” The authors being John Douglas French, Donald B. Lensly, and H.W. Magoun.
MR. LARSON: Very significant volume there. I was wondering if you could hold that up to the monitor so that we can... Yes, fine, I think that gives us the title very nicely. Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: This runs to more than 300 pages, a collection of them taken up with photographs of the people and the program and so on and encompassing the nation stages, the features of gestation, the incipient Brain Research Institute, the construction of this building in which we are sitting, the opening ceremonies, program research and then the sciences in the institute and varieties of project research, advanced education in neuroscience, the problems of communication, the programs of communications in the neurosciences, an account of the tenth anniversary celebration, and the decennial evaluation, the retirement of Dr. French, the appointment of Dr. Clemente, something on the [inaudible] aggregates and a necklace of organize research units that is now developed around the medical center on this campus.
MR. LARSON: Very good. That is a very significant contribution.
DR. MAGOUN: There is a substantial pile of these printing and waiting for distribution. I am, we simply don’t have the cash to give these out ourselves. The going, present going price is $37.50, and you can send your check to the director’s office…
MR. LARSON: Well, fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …the BRI…
MR. LARSON: The director, well that’s fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …UCLA.
MR. LARSON: That is a very significant volume in the history of this very important field.
DR. MAGOUN: If you think so.
MR. LARSON: Yes. This really is marvelous that this gets completed so that people have it available.
DR. MAGOUN: We have it just in time for the banquet. The printers stayed up all night before just to finish the thing off.
MR. LARSON: That’s wonderful.
DR. MAGOUN: I don’t want to boast about it, but I don’t know of any account of how such a kind of program developed with all the facts given attention and it, I think it is something of a novelty in this investigative area.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well, very fine, Dr. Magoun. This has been a wonderful exposition of your career and contributions and the science and the medical applications of all these things. We certainly were fascinated and interested right from the start. If you don’t mind I would just like to ask perhaps some very naïve questions.
DR. MAGOUN: Please do.
MR. LARSON: That occurred to me as you spoke. For instance you made reference to the multi-disciplinary approach that is necessary for this and it comes to mind the number of, amount of new knowledge and new techniques that have become available and I was wondering if there are things that just come to mind right off hand, things like the new biochemistry of DNA and all of its ramifications is one thing and the use of computerizing the taking of data from many of these experiments and since you mentioned multi-disciplinary things, I was wondering if you would comment on what, how some of these things bear on what is now coming out of the science and what is likely to come out in the future using these new techniques and the multi-disciplinary approaches.
DR. MAGOUN: I’m sorry to say that I haven’t kept up with the computer business, but I’m the only one on this campus that hasn’t. That’s roaring of course. The neurosurgeons and neurologists and the computer people and the physiologist, neurophysiologists, the lagging fields that, to join this upsurge of activity strangely enough is neurochemistry and neuropharmacology.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Perhaps that is unique to this medical school because from the very beginning we strove to encourage those departments to acquire people interested in relation to neuroscience, but the addition to destitute, but it doesn’t bring the strength of representation for some strange reason.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Well there are so many fields of chemistry, so many fields of pharmacology today, particularly chemistry of course and it’s just sad that we haven’t been able to build up a great strength of activity in that area, but I guess one should never give up.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course there is always a point there that there is so much to do there has to be a selection and the judgment as to whether this selection is proper or another is something that you’ll have to leave for history to judge.
DR. MAGOUN: I think you are absolutely right. I’m not denigrating either of these fields, they have very fine people in them, and I’m sure their progress has been great in other directions.
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. HORACE MAGOUN
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
August 20, 1984
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
DR. MAGOUN: …delighted to do this and you mentioned I should go way back to where it started and so on.
MR. LARSON: That’s right.
DR. MAGOUN: So I can say just briefly something about my family background.
MR. LARSON: Good, I think that’s very valuable to get a picture.
DR. MAGOUN: This may not be a masterpiece, but it’s an approach. The name Magoun, McGowan, McGovern are all derivatives form the Gallic “Mac” which means “son of” and “Goun” which means “blacksmith”. So that presumably the families with those names have all descended from original Scottish blacksmiths who must by now be long gone. Considering the number of progeny involved in his life and all the way down must have been quite accurate in developing more members of the clan. When I mentioned that these names are all derivatives from a single source I have a sheet here that indicates how easily it is to confuse one with another because in the UCLA southern campus medical students annual publication in 1956, there were a small number of the faculty who had their photograph and a little squib of achievements.
MR. LARSON: Fine. If you wouldn’t mind Dr. Magoun, since this is in automatic focus, if you would just hold it up a little closer to the lens and you can get… Yes, that’s fine.
DR. MAGOUN: Well it was very pleasantly written account of me and this fellow and his picture, but the picture that is under my name is Professor Kenneth McGowan of the Theater Arts Department on this campus. I didn’t know whether to feel flattered or insulted, but I’m just using it now as a backup for evidence that these names do get in the way there. But the first of the Magouns in America were workers in wood rather than in metal as I presume a blacksmith would. When they established a Magoun Boat yards in Medford, Massachusetts, from which in the early 19th century the wooden sailing ships were slipped down a ways into the Charles River and out into Boston Harbor to serve the country’s early commerce. And following that the nation’s U.S. Navy and preserving this association with the sea, my grandmother Magoun operated a soup kitchen for derelicts near the docks in Philadelphia. My father’s brother, Earl Magoun who died only recently, was at that time the oldest surviving naval veteran of the Spanish American War. My father, Roy Winchell Magoun, an episcopal clergyman established and directed a Seaman’s Church Institute at Newport, Rhode Island, during the First World War when Newport was one of the largest naval training centers in the country. On the distaff side of the family, my grandmother Lucy was one of three daughters of a Cole, C-O-L-E family from England who had settled in West Newton, a Boston suburb. As a boy I spent a number of summers with those two sisters, then in retirement at the old family home, after careers of teaching in the Boston school system. Lucy, one of the three, and my grandmother led a more eventful life. She married Horace Mason Perkins who after graduating from Boston Medical and Dental School sailed with his bride to Japan in 1874 to set up a practice of dentistry in Yokohama and that was the only seaport open to foreign commerce in Japan at the time.
MR. LARSON: Yes that must have been very short time after Japan was opened up to the other parts of the world.
DR. MAGOUN: It was indeed. He was, my grandfather was reported to be especially skilled in installing gold fillings and was noted for his speediness in such operations. During his long stay there a series of young Japanese apprentices studied dental work of this nature under his tutelage and received certificates of completion which they then sent off to practices themselves, perhaps having their own protégés in Japan.
MR. LARSON: That must have been the first dental school in Japan.
DR. MAGOUN: I’m not certain that it was of course, but it couldn’t have been much more before that. Following the Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Japan, Yokohama was declared an open port and the “Hill” to the seaward community, was designated as a foreign colony. My grandfather’s clinic was in a building along the beach. They hadn’t built up anything more than a sort of arrangement like that but his small home was on this hill across from a little English church that was one of the earliest churches built there. My mother and my uncle were born and spent their childhood in this setting. A few years ago on a visit to the site of my grandfather’s house, the cherry trees on the side of the hill coming down from the church and graveyard, which had nothing, no Japanese names on the tombstones. The cherry blossoms were all out in full flower and I could easily imagine my mother as a little girl playing there beneath the blossoms. In the 1880’s, my grandfather moved to and continued his practice in Shang Hai, China, and my mother was educated at the French commune there. They hadn’t at that time developed any foreign educational arrangements in Japan itself and the family subsequently returned to Boston, and my mother, after becoming involved in activities in the Episcopal Church, met and married my father. Still later while I was a boy in Newport, Rhode Island, because my father had one parish after another for a long period of time, but finally settled at Newport. My mother use to take me shopping with her and often stopped to buy cheese which my father was very fond of, at a fancy French grocery store established then in Newport for the wealthy summer colony trade. Newport was at its highest peak in the summer colony and still on-going at that time. The proprietor, Emil, was always in the back room working on the books, while Madame was often out in the store waiting on the customers. She and my mother always conversed in elegant French and I can still hear like a tinkling bar of music, Madame calling to the back of the store, “Emil, Emil, quel le la mere du fromage.” (Laughter) Well at Newport, I attended the grade school where the principal wore noisy high buttoned boots and was named Squeaker Carr because you could hear him coming into the room or down the hall, while his female assistant moved silently about in sweeping skirts and they were sweeping.
MR. LARSON: Was this a private school or a public school?
DR. MAGOUN: This was a public school. Oh yes. She was known as Tiptoe Sal. On graduation I was awarded the school’s Rumford Medal, the last I ever received at school and then went on to high school. I don’t know that I’ll, oh, one of the major things that perhaps is pertinent for the present is that by that time I had learned to drive an automobile and they were just coming into that area of Vermont at that time.
MR. LARSON: What time, what year was that?
DR. MAGOUN: This was in, oh, I’ll have to get my calculator out. I’ll tell it to you later.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: I’ll look into it, but I could drive an automobile and the school’s history teacher, a Ms. Higby, employed me as, bought a Buick as I recall, and then employed me as a part-time chauffeur. From this early association I developed a career long interest in history, which now in retirement, I currently pursue full time. Newport was the most attractive setting in the 1920’s. This would have been to toward the later of the ‘20’s I think, particularly in the summer. There were three beaches around the end of the island and the one in the middle was undeveloped. We use to enjoy the low dunes and the salt green beach grass and the crescent of sloping sand and the white tinged surf rolling in, with swooping gulls and [inaudible] always in the background. A wealthy summer colony maintained a casino with a favorable summer stock… do you want to stop making the noise please?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: …Bellview Avenue, the Lipton Cup Yacht races were operational there at that time, as well as the International Cup tennis matches and my brother liked to hang around the tennis courts as I did the theater. These youthful pleasures never last and in the fall of ’25, 1925, my brother and I went off to Rhode Island State College. Just outside the village of Kingston was still a surviving colonial inn, was an early coach stop on the old post road between Boston and New York. I lived in a small room in the back of this inn and gained my meals as a waiter and dish washer at a small restaurant operated just off campus. My brother majored in education and I in biology, out of as best I can remember a romantic interest and attachment for nature. The biology professor, at Little Rhody as it was called at that time, was known to the students as Buggy Barlow, both for literal reasons because of his interest in entomology which dovetailed with the research activities in the agricultural experiment station, a characteristic of even the smallest of the land grant colleges. It was specified that this began to develop activities in agriculture. Are you through with whatever it is you keep rustling?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: Very good. At the, I mentioned Buggy Barlow our biology teacher there and in a rather, plugging along in a rather [inaudible] program I did take the, at the end of my junior year, a summer course in marine biology at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. Our mentor, let’s see, our mentor at this program a biologist from Harvard whose name I won’t mention seemed too keen and completely lacking in the charisma of the predecessor Louie Agathy and was very little improvement over Barlow. But I should be very careful of not denigrating Buggy because… Now would you take the… You want to stop this a minute?
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: In any case, in my senior year in college Professor Barlow received notice of a half time teaching assistantship for graduate study to the master’s degree in zoology at Syracuse University, New York. The Depression was settling in during 1929 and without such support for advanced studies I would, wouldn’t be able to go on with my education. I promptly applied and was most grateful to be accepted. The zoology program at Syracuse was much more lively than that at Kingston. In New York State during that period, the popular sport fishing in the lakes, ponds, and streams became threatened by the deprivation of the game fish population by two aquatic competitors. One was the voracious bottom feeding carp which consumed all of the freshwater vegetation on which the small animal life subsisted to provide in turn the food supply of the game fish. The other the primitive eel shaped protromidon [sp?] was a true predator that attached its round sucker like mouth to the side of game fish and fatally sucked out their vital fluids. Professor William Martin Smallwood supplemented his university appointment by consulting to the state fishery commission which in addition supported his departmental research. Its long time goal was to eradicate the carp and the protromidon from New York’s fishing waters. In Dr. Smallwood’s view the embryonic stages of these predators provided the most vulnerable period for their attack and limitation. Each graduate student was assigned a research project on some feature of their embryogenesis. I have never enjoyed the minute details of microscopic study, but in reading I had noticed that the protromidon had two gigantic nerve cells, one on each side of its lower brain, at the entrance of the vestibular, or the balancing nerve. The short drendenic or receiving branches that reached giant neurons grew out into the entering vestibular fibers and was excited by their signal. The long [inaudible] transmitting branch grew all the way down the spinal cord giving off the laterals along the way which excited the spinal motor valve flow the length of the body musculature. With these two giant neurons, the fish automatically preserved its optimal right side up position in the constantly moving water in response to signals from its balancing receptor. The embryogenesis of these large nerve cells in the protromidon formed the subject of my master’s thesis and adventitiously initiated my first career involvement in neuroscience.
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point there. Your future interests in neuroscience and brains and everything…
DR. MAGOUN: At the start were fishy.
MR. LARSON: Yes well but started right at your early graduate work then.
DR. MAGOUN: Just at my master’s degree.
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting. The only one that I have known that has started that early before was Madame Curie who started with her, you might say her masters work in the field of radioactivity and never left it.
DR. MAGOUN: Isn’t that fascinating? Let me see now. At Syracuse the laboratory program in freshman biology was designed by Professor Smallwood around studies, the study of the pickled earthworm. In the initial exercise in the course, explored the range of normal variations in biology, and its application to each student receiving a contorted shriveled earthworm reeking of phormaline laid out in a pan. In crouching over it to use a hand lens the student counted the number of segments from the mouth to the tail. The TA’s, the teaching assistants recorded the range and frequency of these numbers and constructed a Gaussian curve on the blackboard from the data of the entire class. This seemed a repellent way to introduce beginning students to biology to me and I was all to improve it the next fall. Back in Newport in the intervening summer I visited the docks were the local scallop fishing boats came in and the scallops were shucked and the shells thrown up in great piles along the shore. I arranged for an old [inaudible] who hung around the docks to fill several barrels with these shells and ship them to me at Syracuse. Back at the biology laboratory we filled a large wash boiler with water and lye and dumped in the shells and set them to boiling with Bunsen burners where there were a bunch of burners for the chemistry things…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: …in the same laboratory. On washing them off afterwards with a hose, the shells came out gleamingly pearly white and pink with the prominent ridges of scallops on their backs clearly visible to the naked eye at 20 feet. This time at the first session on each students desk was a pile of these lovely shells. Everyone as large as the palm of your hand and still smelling faintly of the sea. After counting the ridges on the back of the shell they were piled up by numbers of ridges and the profile of these piles itself formed a graphic Gaussian curve.
MR. LARSON: Very good. So you had a very good introduction into biometry and statistics at that point.
DR. MAGOUN: Certainly and I can attest that the students enjoyed it more than those damn worms.
MR. LARSON: Much more vital presentation.
DR. MAGOUN: I agree. The next time I was back at Newport I told the old [inaudible] who shipped us the shells of our success and he said, “You don’t know the half of it. The fisherman saw me packaging these shells and wanted to know what was going on. I told them that all the big universities had begun to use shells in their programs now and if they wanted to make some money they should write to the presidents of Harvard, Yale and Columbia University and ask each one of them how many barrels of scallop shells they wanted shipped.” (Laughter) I wonder what those presidents thought when they got that message. During my first year at Syracuse a young assistant professor of zoology named Walter R. Ingram with a simple name of Rex Ingram following the movie star of that era, was a great favorite in the department, but left at the end of that year to go to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. The following spring I was delighted to have a letter from him saying that an institute of neurology had been established at Northwestern and its director Dr. Stephen W. Ranson had a small number of scholarships for doctoral graduate study and research. Again I applied promptly and the second opportunity for support during the Depression had unexpectedly appeared, this time at Ranson’s Institute of Neurology in Chicago where my subsequent career in neuroscience really began. This institute had been established in 1928 and during its initial year he had revived the use of the [inaudible] clock instrument which was a rectangular metal frame that fitted onto an animal’s head and permitted the positioning of electrodes in the interior of the brain either to stimulate or destroy a focal area, or to record the amplified electrical record of its activity. If you want to stop this for just a second…
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: …this instrument had been constructed from photographs in [Robert] Clarke’s original paper in 1908 and during his first year at the institute Ingram had prepared his stereotaxic atlas of the cat’s brain from which coordinates could be derived for inserted electrodes wherever needed. For more than a decade before Ranson had studied vasomotor responses stimulating the exposed floor of the fourth ventricle and postural responses of the body and limbs to stimulating the transected brain stem of the cerebrum animal. Now he was able to with this implement reach any desired structure inside the brain without removing overlying parts of the nervous system simply by exerting electrodes through small openings in the cranium. After the development of their instrument just after the turn of the century, [Victor] Horsley and Clarke had done almost nothing with it, but at Ranson’s institute until his death in 1942, his instrument was kept humming in a range of projects on the role of the hypothalamus and lower brain stem in this role integration and the emotional expression and in the regulation of feeding, fighting, mating and other vital behavioral functions. It contributed to the well-being of the internal environment as well as the preservation of the individual and the race. As a research fellow I was promptly assigned to operate this remarkable apparatus on which the entire program of the institute rested. Without previous manipulative work with experimental animals my first experience was almost catastrophic. The instrument was fastened to the animals head by bars that inserted in each external auditory canal and little plugs were slipped in first to hold the bar up and in position and in the awkwardness and attention of my maiden effort one of the plugs slipped out of the cat’s ear and all efforts to locate it were futile. I went down on the laboratory floor on my hands and knees, but there was no trace of the plug. Finally I went despairingly home where on disrobing for bed the plug dropped out of the cuff of my trouser leg. I no longer wore cuffs after that.
MR. LARSON: That’s a good recommendation for not having cuffs.
DR. MAGOUN: Following this poor beginning I did acquire dexterity with the instrument with which the entire interior of the brain became an accessible [ inaudible] for experimentations in a way that had never been possible before. After Rex Ingram had left Ranson’s institute to become professor and chairman of anatomy at the University of Iowa where he was able to run his own show, I was assigned his role in inducting the growing number of graduate fellows, post-doctorals, and visiting scientists at the institute into the use of the Horsley-Clarke instrument and other laboratory facilities. Although it has been said that Ranson never actually used this instrument his pride in it continued high and whenever a new visitor arrived Ranson promptly brought him into the laboratory and would always say, “Now this is the Horsley-Clarke Instrument and this is Dr. Magoun.” (Laughter) This is perhaps an apocryphal story, but the same thing was earlier true of Horsley and Clarke, Clarke having been the, one of the partners who really prepared the instrument. He, Clarke, was a little known physiologist, but he would design, developed, and utilize the instrument, but all the credit and recognition went to the dashing young neurosurgeon, Horsley. It was Horsley who had all the distinguished visitors come to see it and he promptly took them into the laboratory and always said, “Now this is the Horsley-Clarke instrument and this is Dr. Clarke.” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Very interesting.
DR. MAGOUN: At the turn of the century, research base in medical was hard to come by. Horsley’s laboratory at University College, London, was little more than a storage space under a sloping amphitheater. So it was only possible to stand up right at one end of the room. Ranson had first seen the Horsley-Clarke instrument in a visit to London in 1910 in that laboratory. Ranson had also seen a precise replica of the original Horsley-Clarke instrument made by the same craftsman in London for the late Dr. Ernest Sach a visiting person in England who had trained in neurosurgery and he had later become professor of neurosurgery at Washington University, St. Louis where Ranson spent a period as professor of anatomy. On Sach’s retirement, I should say first that on returning to this country Sachs arranged with Clarke to have a second, a replica, a second Horsley-Clarke instrument which he purchased and brought back to St. Louis. While Ranson was at the same medical school he had seen its use by Sachs in the neurosurgical laboratory. On Sach’s retirement from active neurosurgery, he moved to Yale University Medical School where, in 1956 in a moving ceremony he presented his Horsley-Clark instrument to me. And it now rests and stays in the nation’s archives of the history of neuroscience at UCLA with the earplugs all in place. (Laughter) This is the second Horsley-Clarke instrument that was ever prepared in the world.
MR. LARSON: That is a fascinating story. So we have here a very historic piece there which really opened up the science of studying the brain and nerve function.
DR. MAGOUN: Exactly stated, yes. We always bring it out and present it to visitors here, but I never say, “Now, this is the Horsley-Clarke instrument and this is Dr. Larson.” (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well, fine. This is very fascinating, a very fascinating instrument and a very historic instrument here.
DR. MAGOUN: Every once in a while we put in something with some lye in it and get it shiny again, but I don’t want to get the thing destroyed in any fashion. Well, following Ranson’s death in 1942, I was invited to move from this well-appointed institute in the Central Tower of Northwestern Medical School down to among the bare bones of the anatomy department. There I abruptly became aware of the expensive nature of the research that had been going on. All of the support from which had been obtained by Ranson. Research grants for young scientists were unheard of in the 1940’s, but the annual epidemic of polio in that era led to the formation of a new National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the fundraising program of which was called the March of Dimes. Do you remember the March of Dimes?
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. I can remember…
DR. MAGOUN: It was one of those early approaches to get collecting public funds.
MR. LARSON: I think it was probably one of the first for collecting funds for research, actually aimed at a specific…
DR. MAGOUN: At a focal disorder.
MR. LARSON: Yes and a very successful fundraising effort and a very successful from the standpoint for what those funds brought forth.
DR. MAGOUN: I want to tell you one thing. A number of Chicago cases, and it was sort of endemic in Chicago for a number of years, was [inaudible] Chicago cases of that period were of the borbet type, rather than in the spinal cord which was more common. They were up in the bottom of the brain, in the brain stem.
MR. LARSON: What are the different manifestations of the two different types?
DR. MAGOUN: The ones that were in the brain stem if they became much enlarged would paralyze the respiratory system.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: The respiratory system, or the vasomotor system. Most of these were fatal cases. In spinal cases, they paralyze our limbs, but they don’t interfere with the vital activities that are operated in the stem of the brain, inside the cranium.
MR. LARSON: Fine. Well that clarifies a very important point there.
DR. MAGOUN: There is a major difference. In any case a number of these were borbet type and with trepidation I had applied to the Foundation for some of their dimes to study the neuropathology of fatal cases as we had just been discussing, and then explore the functions of the injured region in animal experiments. To my astonishment the project was supported. In the fatal cases, the central reticular core of the brain stem proved to be the principal seed of injury and in related animal studies stimulation of this region did not itself evoke motor responses, but either facilitated or inhibited ongoing motor performance depending on the site of stimulation. These studies in the human brain suggested that the particular formation of the brain stem contributed importantly to the extra neural motor function of the brain and in this work I participated in some of the activities of a second research center that by then had been established in Chicago, the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. Its research director, Dr. Percival Bailey had recruited Warren McCuller, Gerhard von Berneen and a number of research oriented young surgeons to the INI, the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute was always known in the basement laboratory there for research. Among others of these was a talented young neurosurgeon, John Douglas French, who was returning to his native California to become chief of neurosurgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Long Beach, near Los Angeles, of whom more later. Another important association in this period is that of Donald B. Lensly who moved to Northwestern’s Evanston campus as professor of psychology coming from Brown University. In his earlier years, Don had become an expert at electroencephalography at Harvard, EEG for short. At Brown he had provided important insights in the development of the EEG in children and at Northwestern he was interested in getting into electrophysiology and animal experimentation. The facilities were lacking on the Evanston Campus so he set up an EEG research facility in the anatomy department of the medical school. Serendipitously, Giuseppe Maritsi from Pisa, Italy, who had earlier gained electrophysiological experience with Hadrien in London and Vermeer, came to Chicago for a year as a Rockefeller fellow to our laboratory. During some initial experiments on the interrelations of the brain stem with cerebellar inhibition, we were perplexed to note the large slow waves of the particle EEG of lightly anesthetized animals recorded that relatively low amplitude because of their high reach became abolished during stimulation of the brain stem particular formation. This was readily repeatable but we thought that some artifact must be involved. After ruling out a variety of possible complications, the amplification of the cortical record was by chance turned up. Then we saw that when the large slow waves gave way during particular stimulation there was instead a record of low voltage fast activity called, the term at that time, EEG arousal, a pattern which was characteristic of alert attention in the human EEG. Invocation of this generalized EEG response has since become common place, but it is still possible to recall the arousal evoked in the investigators by its initial display in response to stimulation, a focal part of the brain, the brain stem reticular formation. In related animal studies with Dr. Lensly it was found that the EEG arousal evoked, could be evoked also by peripheral sensory stimulation and was conducted through this central reticular core of the brain rather than along the conspicuously lateral pathways through the brain stem. In early studies of wakefulness, evoked by [inaudible] stimulation in the cat it has been found that this low voltage fast pattern of EEG activity could be initiated equivalently by a range of sensory modalities and however elicited was distributed generally over the cortex without [inaudible] or the specific sensory involved. Furthermore once initiated this EEG pattern tended to persist for periods far longer than the brief sensory stimuli that sent it into play. While indicating the importance of [inaudible] stimulation and evoking EEG and [inaudible] these observations had suggested the additional role of a central mechanism with a more general influence and a greater intrinsic capacity for maintained excitation than any specific [inaudible]. These Chicago studies with Maritsi and Lensly identified this widespread cortisiprical projection with the central brain stem reticular formation which serves wakefulness and the focus of attention and through which the arousing influences of adherent stimulation are effected. This pattern of low voltage, fast discharge in the EEG had been known since its initial observation by Hans Berger in Germany in the 1920’s was now recognized as a function of the ascending ventricular system. In addition to its association with alert wakefulness it appears to form a background for the perception of sensation as well as for higher intellectual activity in voluntary movement and behavior. Anything that can be learned about the intimate physiology of these processes may be expected therefore to make some contribution to an understanding of the relations to the brain and perhaps the mind. The impact of these findings on the ascending ventricular system responsible for cortical wakefulness and the focus of attention was a ranger one. There are a number of succeeding commentaries that buy this. The most amusing and appealing to me being a short verse composed by a young medical student, Paul Pearlstein at the University of Illinois. Its title was “The Formation Reticular for Impulses Vehicular of Dr. Magoun, No Medical Loon” and the verse continued:
“The reticular formation has an awkward location in the most hidden spot that the cat has got. I’ve never seen it, but to be quite fair I believe the men who say it’s there because if it wasn’t, it would mean the ruin of the reputation of Doc Magoun, who claims that this web like formation is a great back feeding nuclear station. It helps my mind awake and sleep. It helps the Lord my soul to keep. The gland pineal can justly damned, for it’s too small a place for this soul to be crammed. The ventricles are just a hole, to ephemeral a substance for the soul. So since I’m made of sterner stuff, I’m sure unless Magoun’s a bluff that my inner person, king or bum resides in my reticulum.”
MR. LARSON: Very good. He’s a real talent for literature there and brought in the scientific facts in a very understandable way.
DR. MAGOUN: He shouldn’t have gone on to medical school. He had more talent I think. This next period will start in the beginnings of the brain research institute here in which we are presently sitting.
MR. LARSON: Yes, now let’s see. We should probably fix the time frame of this. What year was that that we start?
DR. MAGOUN: For me it was 1950.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: I arrived with the family here in Westwood, Santa Monica actually, in, the Fourth of July, 1950.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: We didn’t have any firecrackers, but we were parading a feeling just by getting settled in California. From about mid-century on the research in the biomedical and the other sciences in this country like pans on a hot stove, began to steam and bubble. During World War II the Office of Scientific Research and Development had poured millions of dollars in war-related research and a subsequent report of its director Vannevar Bush entitled, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” which I’m sure is familiar to you.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Advocated the post-war continuation of federal support of research and training in the sciences, and this was followed up by the Presidents and Congress. To advance the biomedical science the already existing National Institute of Health was greatly expanded. In addition, the independent Science Foundation was established to support basic research in all scientific fields. Grants for research and training grants to prepare more research scientists were initiated together with construction grants, grants for the establishment of research institutes in priority fields and other ramifying developments all of which took off like the subsequent A-bombs of AEC and the moon rockets of NASA. By contrast at Northwestern Medical School, Ranson’s former Institute of Neurology had become essentially dismantled by mid-century and prospects for expanding investigative activities there were somewhere below zero. With a real investigative breakthrough in progress taking off from the background of the achievements of Ranson’s institute I felt quite boxed in in Chicago. In the pattern of many earlier serendipitous features in my career, in the spring of 1950 I was invited to join the just developing new medical school at UCLA to establish its department of anatomy. Needless to say I accepted promptly. We bought an old, but operational Lincoln sedan and drove out to the western National Parks with three children to arrive in Los Angeles and start a new life in California as I said on the Fourth of July, 1950. The department of anatomy developed expeditiously but from the background of my previous experience I recognized the difficulties in establishing a novel research program in a new medical school. The founding dean, Stafford L. Warren, was however an alumnus of the University of California Medical School at Berkeley and San Francisco. As a medical student he had been a research assistant of Herbert M. Evans, the distinguished endocrinologist at Berkeley and later was staff, was a Hooper Foundation Fellow with George Whipple, subsequently a Nobel Laureate for his research on the liver at San Francisco. Dean Warren encouraged these early research traditions at the new medical school at UCLA and in this he was aided and abetted by Dr. John D. French, the chief of neurosurgery at the Long Beach VA Hospital, in my earlier Chicago acquaintance at the Illinois Neuropsychiatric Institute. Shortly after moving to UCLA in 1950 I joined with French in developing a collaborative program in the interdisciplinary research in the neurosciences at the Long Beach VA Hospital. During the following decade, other faculty at the growing medical school, post-doctorals from many institutions and visiting scientists from this country and abroad, extended the dimensions of our initial program to that of an exceedingly active brain research institute in [inaudible] with John D. French, its founding director. In 1961, this aggregate brain research institute program moved from Long Beach to a newly constructed 10 story wing of research laboratories and related facilities on the UCLA campus interconnecting the medical school proper with the neuropsychiatric institute which had already been established here in something of a pattern of its forbearer at the University of California, San Francisco. The dimensions of growth and the range of investigative activities in the BRI [Brain Research Institute] during its first quarter century are indicated by the fields of some 175 research projects underway in the institute in 1976-77. The largest of these were in neurobiology and in declining order those in other fields were neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuroendocrinology, behavioral sciences, pharmacology, neuro-engineering and computer sciences and neuro-anatomy. Some additional projects were ongoing in the BRI clinical neurophysiology program interrelating basic sciences with neurosurgeons, neurologists, neuro-pathologists, and psychologist. Related closely to these research programs have been the institutes of educational activities. Although a research institute may not enroll students for itself, or for curricular enroll students, or award degrees, but graduate students in traditional departmental programs may serve as research assistants or pursue dissertation projects in the BRI’s laboratory. During ’76-’77 there were 184 graduate students in the BRI. The numbers in the six leading departmental fields being psychology, anatomy, in declining order, physiology, biology, biological chemistry, and pharmacology. The largest group of all however comprised 46 students enrolled in a novel interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in neuroscience initiated in 1968 with John French chairman of its administrating committee representing nine cooperating departments. During ’73 to ’77, 16 Ph.D.’s had already been awarded in this new graduate field.
MR. LARSON: What would be some of the typical Ph.D. theses in this? What would be some examples perhaps?
DR. MAGOUN: I wish I had, we have files that have every one of them, but I can’t quickly retrieve a precise title, but it was very much as was the post-doctoral research going on for more advanced levels of research and training. There were a substantial number, 142 post-doctoral fellows and 68 visiting scientists collaborating in the investigative program ongoing in the BRI during this period. Over the past decade, approximately one third of these advanced investigators had come from some 40 countries in both the graduate and doctoral dissertations and in the post-doctoral training which was even larger than the graduate, the novel and usual pattern was they would join the ongoing programs of the professors or the other mentors.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: So that they didn’t have to generate novel programs of their own unless they wished to, in which case they were given whatever assistance we could find, but it melted into ongoing programs, but they could then take sections of them for themselves and go on that way. We never pushed anyone down, but we helped them get up by giving them a period of just adapting to what you do when you’re doing research in the laboratory.
MR. LARSON: It sounds like it would be a very productive technique for bringing both the students and the field along.
DR. MAGOUN: Right. Also it was productive in the sense that a number of these students identified features that hadn’t been looked at and pushed into those and embellished the program by this influx of new outlooks and persons…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: …through the time. In 1976, after 25 years of leadership, both in the development and continuing administration at the BRI, Dr. French announced his retirement as director. Regrets were tempered by his simultaneous announcement of an endowed Leslie chair in neuroscience at UCLA, together with an additional reward of $1 million by the Ahmanson Foundation to establish and equip a new Ahmanson laboratory of neurobiology at the Brain Research Institute. Dr. French’s talented successor as director of the BRI is Carmine D. Clemente, professor and former chairman of the anatomy department at UCLA who was attracted to this campus in 1952. Earlier at the University of Pennsylvania, Clemente had been a protégé of William F. Wendell, who had previously succeeded Ranson as the director of the Institute of Neurology at Northwestern University. Ranson in turn had been the last doctoral graduate and protégé of Henry H. Donaldson who had left the University of Chicago in 1905 to direct a neuroscience research program at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. A year later the Wistar Institute was formally recognized by a then existing international brain research commission as the central institute for brain research in America. From its beginnings at the start of the century therefore, this genetic strain of directors of neuroscience research units Donaldson, Ranson, Wendell, French, and Clemente, was now in its fifth generation.
MR. LARSON: Amazing.
DR. MAGOUN: I don’t, I think you could turn that off if you wanted.
[Break in video]
DR. MAGOUN: Following these developments in the decade preceding my retirement, I became increasingly involved in administrative activities related to higher education and research as dean of the graduate division at UCLA. In this period, I served also on three NIH councils, mental health, neuro and [inaudible] research as well as on the advisory committees of the LNM, NASS [National Agricultural Statistics Service], NSF [National Science Foundation] and the National Research Council for which I later directed the fellowship of it for a couple of years, ’72 to ’74. In the area of international activities of science, I was on the joint committee of the US-Japan cooperative science program involving the Departments of State and National Science Foundation, as well as the Medical Research Committee of the Pan-American Health Organization in Latin America. I was also on the executive committee of the International Brain Research Organization, abbreviated IBRO, established at UNESCO House, Paris in 1960. The history of which is of great interest. During the 1950’s and ‘60’s with the accelerating growth of the neurosciences a number of small conference programs developed in this field, both to advance communication between investigators and to catalyze there collaboration in interdisciplinary directions. Four of these early conference programs, each in a different country were first the Macy Foundation Conferences in this country, second, the Ciba Foundation Symposia in the United Kingdom, third, the Ghagra Symposia on the Black Sea in Georgia, USSR, and a series of Colluque de Marseilles [trans: Conference in France] in France. In this later series, the fifth colluque in 1955 was marked by the initial participation abroad of scientists from the USSR, two of whom from Moscow attended. A year later, [French Name], the colluque’s director was invited to Moscow for a meeting with these Soviet scientists at their Academy of Sciences as an outcome of which the Academy sponsored an international colloquium on the EEG of higher nervous activity in Moscow in 1958. This Moscow colloquium was the first such gathering in this field to be held in the USSR since the congress of the international union of physiological sciences which had convened in Moscow in 1935 under the presidency of I.P. [Ivan Petrovich] Pavlov.
MR. LARSON: Yes, well it goes back to the grand old name of, you might say, brain research.
DR. MAGOUN: Yes. At the colloquium’s concluding session, it was a week long program, in 1958, the participants stirred by the report that had developed, unanimously resolved to form a prominent international organization for the study of the brain, to facilitate contacts between scientists in different countries and in varied disciplines of this field. Shortly after delegates from the colloquium, presented this resolution to UNESCO and two years later the International Brain Research Organization as I abbreviated before, IBRO, was formally established with a program that proposed a series of interdisciplinary symposia, a survey of scientists in each country, research laboratories and programs in all countries and a number of other activities. The elated US survey for IBRO was undertaken in 1968-’69 after the supervision of a brain research committee, or under the supervision of the Brain Sciences Committee of the National Research Council. It identified the astonishingly enlarged number of more than 4,500 neuroscientists in this country.
MR. LARSON: I had no idea that…
DR. MAGOUN: Nobody did.
MR. LARSON: …there was that many. It’s such an extensive…
DR. MAGOUN: Nobody did. The Brain Sciences Committee was so impressed that in 1969 under its auspices a Society for Neuroscience was organized in this country, the first annual meeting of which was held in Washington in 1971. Its current membership in 1981 exceeds 7,000 and the total number of scientists in all fields of neuroscience in this country is currently estimated at about 10,000 with the prospect of increasing 15,000 by 1985. I don’t know if that is going to be met or not. This projection is from a report on manpower in basic neurological and communicative sciences. Present status and future needs, published as a NINCDIS monograph in 1977. It was prepared by a National Research Council committee of neuroscientists for which I was a consultant and co-ghost writer during 1975-’76, my last professional responsibility in this field. To return to the founding of IBRO at the first meeting of its executive committee in 1961, support was given to the proposal that IBRO engage in active work in the field of brain history, considered from an original and multi-disciplinary point of view. I was appointed chairman of the subcommittee on brain history, this subcommittee on brain history which when informed was to arrange meetings in associations with congress and symposia, collect and display historical material, consider the translation and republication of certain classical works now out of print, with contemporary commentaries attached, also to establish a program center for these activities probably in the division of medical history at the University of California, at Los Angeles. All of this is being quoted from the IBRO bulletin, volume 1, 1962. Until his death in 1970, C. Donald O’Malley, then professor of medical history at UCLA played an active role in organizing a number of historical conferences and symposia in different countries and in collaboration with Dr. Edwin Clark, published an exceedingly value of compilations of translations of the history of the human brain and spinal cord. In this same stream and I am presently engaged in the study of the development of the neuro behavioral and communicative sciences in this country with particular emphasis on those conjunctional steps leading to the present interdisciplinary field of neuroscience. My preoccupation with brain history has long been an avocational interest for which only limited opportunities were previously available. Now in so-called retirement I am happily able to pursue this fascinating subject full time and I would just like to add as a conclusion…
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …that the most recent publication that we have been able to print has been the, and I quote the title, “An American contribution to neuroscience: the Brain Research Institute UCLA, 1959 to 1984.” The authors being John Douglas French, Donald B. Lensly, and H.W. Magoun.
MR. LARSON: Very significant volume there. I was wondering if you could hold that up to the monitor so that we can... Yes, fine, I think that gives us the title very nicely. Fine.
DR. MAGOUN: This runs to more than 300 pages, a collection of them taken up with photographs of the people and the program and so on and encompassing the nation stages, the features of gestation, the incipient Brain Research Institute, the construction of this building in which we are sitting, the opening ceremonies, program research and then the sciences in the institute and varieties of project research, advanced education in neuroscience, the problems of communication, the programs of communications in the neurosciences, an account of the tenth anniversary celebration, and the decennial evaluation, the retirement of Dr. French, the appointment of Dr. Clemente, something on the [inaudible] aggregates and a necklace of organize research units that is now developed around the medical center on this campus.
MR. LARSON: Very good. That is a very significant contribution.
DR. MAGOUN: There is a substantial pile of these printing and waiting for distribution. I am, we simply don’t have the cash to give these out ourselves. The going, present going price is $37.50, and you can send your check to the director’s office…
MR. LARSON: Well, fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …the BRI…
MR. LARSON: The director, well that’s fine.
DR. MAGOUN: …UCLA.
MR. LARSON: That is a very significant volume in the history of this very important field.
DR. MAGOUN: If you think so.
MR. LARSON: Yes. This really is marvelous that this gets completed so that people have it available.
DR. MAGOUN: We have it just in time for the banquet. The printers stayed up all night before just to finish the thing off.
MR. LARSON: That’s wonderful.
DR. MAGOUN: I don’t want to boast about it, but I don’t know of any account of how such a kind of program developed with all the facts given attention and it, I think it is something of a novelty in this investigative area.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well, very fine, Dr. Magoun. This has been a wonderful exposition of your career and contributions and the science and the medical applications of all these things. We certainly were fascinated and interested right from the start. If you don’t mind I would just like to ask perhaps some very naïve questions.
DR. MAGOUN: Please do.
MR. LARSON: That occurred to me as you spoke. For instance you made reference to the multi-disciplinary approach that is necessary for this and it comes to mind the number of, amount of new knowledge and new techniques that have become available and I was wondering if there are things that just come to mind right off hand, things like the new biochemistry of DNA and all of its ramifications is one thing and the use of computerizing the taking of data from many of these experiments and since you mentioned multi-disciplinary things, I was wondering if you would comment on what, how some of these things bear on what is now coming out of the science and what is likely to come out in the future using these new techniques and the multi-disciplinary approaches.
DR. MAGOUN: I’m sorry to say that I haven’t kept up with the computer business, but I’m the only one on this campus that hasn’t. That’s roaring of course. The neurosurgeons and neurologists and the computer people and the physiologist, neurophysiologists, the lagging fields that, to join this upsurge of activity strangely enough is neurochemistry and neuropharmacology.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Perhaps that is unique to this medical school because from the very beginning we strove to encourage those departments to acquire people interested in relation to neuroscience, but the addition to destitute, but it doesn’t bring the strength of representation for some strange reason.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. MAGOUN: Well there are so many fields of chemistry, so many fields of pharmacology today, particularly chemistry of course and it’s just sad that we haven’t been able to build up a great strength of activity in that area, but I guess one should never give up.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Of course there is always a point there that there is so much to do there has to be a selection and the judgment as to whether this selection is proper or another is something that you’ll have to leave for history to judge.
DR. MAGOUN: I think you are absolutely right. I’m not denigrating either of these fields, they have very fine people in them, and I’m sure their progress has been great in other directions.
[End of Interview]